Gearfuse

Alright. Stick with me on this one. You crazy Europeans love to created weird names for products, like The Mirror by Violet. That being said, The Mirror’ is one of the neatest gadgets I’ve seen in a long time. Hook the $60 plate up to your Mac or PC and get ready to read some RFID tags. The set includes Ztamps (glorified RFID tags) that you can stick in objects and assign actions. For instance, say you shove one inside a sandwich. When you put the sandwich on top of the The Mirror by Violet, it could open up Firefox and surf to the Scanwiches blog.

Sounds like a creative tool. I’d like to know how you’d use this cheap RFID reader. I’d probably shove some in empty CD cases so that the songs would automatically play in iTunes when activated.

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While the Amazon Kindle 2 is a fresh take on an e-book reader with its ability to read back books to you, some people who have a visual impairment could use something they can feel rather than hear. That’s the idea behind this concept braille e-book reader. Bumps change on a dynamic surface that can emulate braille, thus bringing a whole new world of reading to the blind.

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Wow. That was, like, really quick Mr. Bezos. Nice work.

Amazon decided to make an incredibly smart business decision and today released an iPhone Kindle app that allows you to download books on the go and read them on your iPhone. It’s a much cheaper way to enjoy the Kindle’s unique features on the device you prefer. Oh, and the killer part about all this? Free app. Amazon is playing it smart, knowing that a free app will encourage consumers to purchase some eBooks from the Amazon.com.

Readers rejoice. Your time has come. It’s like a reading rainbow, sans Levar Burton.

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We haven’t been talking about the Amazon Kindle 2 a lot. Know why? Because everyone and their mother has been talking about it. Jeff Bezos was even on The Colbert Report shilling his new eBook reader. Interestingly, though, when the boys at iFixIt cracked open a brand new Kindle 2, they found a surprise waiting inside. See that circled area on the PCB? That’s a space for a SIM card. And something tells me, that with a soldering iron, a SIM card holder and some programming, you could turn the Kindle 2 into an entirely new device. Perhaps you could even speed up the downloads of eBooks and digital content.

Any ideas? What do you think that missing SIM slot is for?

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Do you read books? Excellent, but what about e-Books? They’re like books, except they are electronic. Don’t you understand the paradigm here? Get with the 21st century, McFly! Yesterday morning, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle 2. It’s better than the original Kindle and just as expensive, costing $359 which will ensure it doesn’t sell like hotcakes. Here’s the feature breakdown:

* Thinner: 0.36 inches thick, 25% thinner than an iPhone
* Quicker: Turns pages 20% faster
* Longer lasting: 25% increase in battery life
* Better display: 16 shades of gray (was 4)
* Bigger memory: Stores up to 1,500 books
* Bigger vocabulary: Built-in 250,000 dictionary
* Better navigation: With a 5-way joystick
* More vocal: Able to read text aloud in a semi-robotic voice
* Less accident prone: The page-turn buttons are smaller and harder to hit by mistake
* More wired: New Whispersync technology (more below)

Well, well Mr. Bezos. It seems you’ve foiled us again. Oh wait. How much is a book from the Amazon store? $9.99? No thanks.

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Rid yourself of the burden of carrying multiple books with an eReader. It just so happens that Sony’s latest digital reader is its best yet. This new model, the PRS-700, weighs only 10 ounces and features a touchscreen for easy transition from chapter to chapter. Sony’s also added LED backlights on the sides of the 6″ screen, so you won’t have to worry about lights out time raining on your parade.

With memory that can store up to 350 books, the chances of you running out of reading material are slim. In the rare case that you do run out of material, SD and Memory Stick Duo cards can breathe new life into the eReader with new reading material of your choosing. It’s as if a library was jam packed into a PDA, without the bitchy librarian and the “one book at a time” policy.

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If there’s one thing that’ll interest you about Sony’s third generation internal Blu-ray optical drive, the BWU-300S, it’s not the specs. So, what if it can write single and dual layer BD-R discs at up to 8X speed, or if it writes DVDs at up to 16X, CDs up to 48X and supports DVD-RAM recording.

No, we don’t care about all of that. We care that this drive comes with a free movie, not the news about no DH DVD playback. So long as it comes with Men In Black on Blu-ray, we’ll buy it. That’s like – a fifteen dollar value. Unbelievable.

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We all know the bittersweet joy of switching cell phone plans. You are so happy that you don’t have to deal with the crap that your last company was giving you, but you now get the opportunity to reprogram every single one of your contacts back into your new phone. If you are one of the lucky few, you can just sync them with a contact program in your computer. If you aren’t one of these people, this iMONO Direct Access Card Reader might be just the thing for you. This thing lets your plug your SIM card into its port, and edit your contacts through a simple interface right on your computer screen. That little keypad is a pain to type contacts into, we all know it. There is a big difference between texting someone and inputing names and numbers for hours on end. So for only $25, you can get this little gadget and save yourself a ton of time. Time is money people, time is money…

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